When Max Schrems asked the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to stop Facebook Ireland transferring his personal information to the U.S. in 2013, he couldn’t have foreseen that it would put the personal data processing operations of thousands of other businesses in legal jeopardy.

Schrems’ 2013 complaint went all the way to the European Union’s top court, which in 2015 unexpectedly struck down the Safe Harbor Agreement on transatlantic data transfers. Thousands of businesses that had relied on this to justify their export of customers’ and employees’ personal data from the EU to the U.S. for processing suddenly had to seek alternate legal justification — or find data hosting and processing resources inside the EU.

Salesforce.com’s $15.7 billion bid for Tableau Software has many organizations wondering how the proposed acquisition will impact their operations. According to industry analysts, it all depends on how your enterprise makes use of their respective platforms.

Users of Salesforce’s CRM platform have all subscribed to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, putting their data in the cloud — but the company is only beginning to respond to the demand for sophisticated tools to analyze that data.

Almost two-thirds of businesses are planning to migrate an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the cloud or are already doing so, despite many of them having concerns about moving sensitive data, security and regulatory compliance.

That’s according to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), which asked 200 businesses about their ERP migration plans. They represent a small slice of a big market: Businesses will spend $30 billion on cloud ERP systems in 2021, and a total of $266 billion on all public cloud services, according to CSA's Impact of Cloud on ERP report.

Enterprises seeking to further democratize analytics through self-service business intelligence tools will be heartened by a push by vendors to intersect data visualization and natural language processing. Tableau Software’s 2019.1 update, released Wednesday, is the latest to move in this direction, enabling staff to query data using natural language, and offers a new subscription option for self-service data preparation.

Other new features include the ability to export visualizations as PowerPoint files, customizable alerts when data changes, new tools for Tableau administrators and a redesigned mobile interface.

How many statisticians do you need to build a new data model? Zero, according to Tableau Software: It says the next version of its widely used analytics tool will do it itself.

Tableau demonstrated this, and a new feature called Ask Data that allows users to create visualizations by describing what they want in natural language, at an event for customers in New Orleans last week. It also showed off new automation functions in its data preparation tool.

CIOs should hope for the best but prepare for the worst when transferring personal information across the Atlantic. That’s the advice of experts watching the European Commission conduct its second annual review of the Privacy Shield data-sharing agreement.

Privacy Shield allows businesses to export the personal information of their customers or employees to the U.S. while still complying with the EU’s strict privacy laws, and replaced the Safe Harbor Agreement, which was invalidated by the EU’s top court in October 2015.

The Commission made 10 recommendations for improvement in its first review last October, and if it is unhappy with the response of the U.S. administration to these, it could theoretically suspend or cancel the agreement.

What is an inventory management system?

An inventory management system tracks purchases, keeps count of goods and supplies in stock, and reorders supplies when levels get low. More sophisticated inventory management systems can track stock location and will even predict the optimum time to reorder supplies, drawing on a variety of data, including past sales and weather forecasts.

Inventory management systems integrate with — or may potentially replace — purchasing and sales systems, and they provide tools to reconcile stock levels calculated from purchasing and sales with real-world counts taken from warehouses via barcode scanners or RFID readers.

The good news: Six of the biggest companies in IT are setting out to eliminate the silos in which enterprises store customer data.

The bad news? They're doing it in two different ways, and both ways will miss a lot of the silos holding enterprise data.

On the one hand we have the Open Data Initiative, unveiled by Microsoft, SAP and Adobe. This gathers data from Adobe's Customer Experience Platform, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 and SAP's S/4HANA database and C/4HANA CRM system onto Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform using a single data model.

Google has been ordered to pay a $5.05 billion fine and stop forcing Android smartphone makers to install its search engine and browser on their phones. That decision was handed down by the European Union's antitrust authority on Wednesday.

The ruling could open the way for smartphone makers to offer more choice, with devices running different versions of Android, or offering alternative browsers or search engines out of the box.

The European Commission found that Google has abused its dominant market position in three ways: tying access to the Play store to installation of Google Search and Google Chrome; paying phone makers and network operators to exclusively install Google Search, and preventing manufacturers from making devices running forks of Android.

A vote by European Union lawmakers seeking to suspend Privacy Shield could spell bad news for businesses that have built their GDPR compliance strategy on adherence to the EU-U.S. data transfer agreement’s principles.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, like its predecessor the Data Protection Directive, authorizes the export of EU citizens’ personal information only to jurisdictions that provide an adequate level of privacy protection.

Privacy Shield, an agreement signed by EU and U.S. officials in 2016, seeks to reconcile the different levels of legal protection afforded on each side of the Atlantic, allowing businesses to export EU citizens’ data to the U.S. for processing.

The U.S. department of labor forecasts that the healthcare industry will add 4 million new jobs by 2016.

That should be a daunting prospect for anyone working in that industry — particularly given that the rising cost of healthcare (18 percent of GDP in 2016, up from 10 percent 30 years ago) means that employees don’t come cheap.

There’s a shake-up – and a scandal – in the Top500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The U.S. has retaken first place in the Top500 list after five years of dominance by China. Computers built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy have pushed the previous two record-holders, both Chinese, into second and fourth place.